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→View's on Open Source
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''Earn Money''
You have to know what your goal is. Is your writing a hobby, a career, or a means to an end. You should re-evaluate your volunteer to paid ratio every 6-12 months. If you want yo to make money, you should probably cut down on the volunteer work. '''If you are entering the field expect to pay you'r dues.''' This means that you will need to start by writing free reviews.
Dru Lavigne also talked about helping your fellow writers. You can do this by introducing them to editors and publishers. You can invite them to co-write an article or book with you, and even invite them to speak at conferences.
I found this talk very interesting, I always tried to minimize my web presence with the mentality that employers don't like seeing drunken facebook photos. I never thought about the amount of free advertising you can get by publishing stuff on the web. It's like volunteering from home.
==[http://fsoss.senecac.on.ca/2009/node/115 Ranking the Bugs: Predicting Which Bugs Will Get Fixed] by: Diederik van Liere==
Jetpack Add-On to Predict Likelihood of Bug Fix in Bugzilla, Crowdsourcing Flamy Firefox Bugreports, and Crowdsurfing Mozilla Developers Handles. Check out [http://network-labs.org/2009/10/links-for-fsoss-2009-conference-attendees/ Diederik's blog] on these tools.
==View's on Open Source, Conclusion==
Both Dru's and Diederik's views on Open Source were positive. Dru talked about using the community in order to get noticed and also helping your fellow writer's get noticed. Diederik talked about using the communities' knowledge to help with fixing bugs and also getting new comers through the learning curve. Both speakers recognize the potential gold mine (the community).
While listening to the presentations, I realized that the Open Source community is filled with people that want to learn and want to teach. It kind of hard to imagine that people actually get paid for doing Open Source stuff, especially since it seems like it's their hobby. I've done full time work before and it's rarely something to be excited about, but all of these presenters were actually excited!
I guess passion and sharing are the major points I took away from this symposium.
